The Great Resignation: We have seen this before. And it all worked out well.

People are quitting their jobs in record numbers. The proportion of workers quitting their jobs, known as the quit rate, has reached very high levels.?Quits are seen as a positive sign that workers are confident that they can find another job. Most people who quit do so for higher-paying positions. There is more money elsewhere. And jobs are plentiful. Startups are attractive to take a risk with lucrative pay, stock options, and titles.?

Oh, and it's March 2000.

While it's been 22 years since we experienced this, and if you entered the workforce in 2002, most likely born after 1980, you think this is new. It's not. We have been here before. And while tracking quit rates is more difficult since it was tracked before the 2000s, piecing together data shows it happened in 1945, and in regular waves.

In 2000 I was at the cybersecurity company AXENT. (Yes, there were large publicly held cybersecurity companies even 22 years ago; NASDAQ: AXNT $115M in revenue about $189M today). Growing, successful, acquiring companies, with a team that had been in place since the early 1990s, I joined in the mid-90s. The company, due to its success, had several offers to be acquired. In the summer of 1999, we chose to work with one particular buyer that was a fit. However unexpectedly the deal fell through after months of work. When that acquisition deal fell through and given the frothy market for jobs, people lost faith that there would be a good conclusion to the business.?We had been losing people due to the 'great resignation' then, and now it escalated.

Our top sales representative left. Our VP of worldwide sales resigned. Our Asia Pacific Vice President who had grown up with the company working his way through Human Resources and many other areas resigned. Our business development and partnerships quit. Our Vice President of channels who came through an acquisition resigned. We lost our engineering Vice Presidents in various locations that had come through acquisitions as their stay bonuses lapsed and they wanted to move on to new startup opportunities; locations in Waltham (Boston), Cupertino, Fremont, and Nashua all lost their leadership.? It was like watching a collapse. Yet the company had top-tier products and services and marquee customers.

People asked me regularly when I was going to quit. Having left in a similar situation just ten years earlier in my career, for a startup, I chose a different path. I was staying. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was determined to see it through and be on the team to drive the company to more success.?

It wasn’t going to be easy. With the lost acquisition opportunity that happened concluded after many months of work in December 1999, and us losing key leadership, we had to scramble to put things back together and regain momentum. For sure, it wasn’t going to be easy. Now people were leaving to follow the leadership that left. these were people that helped built the company and we knew could produce results. There were also friends that we worked alongside, some for many years. So it wasn’t easy. It was difficult. Difficult to rebuild and rebuild and rebuild all the time.

And then we had more ‘good luck’:?the dot com bubble burst. That happened in Spring 2000 after investors realized many of these companies had business models that weren’t viable. Imagine that.

The party was over.?And some say the party will be over soon as I write this, with a recession looming in the future in 2023.

Anyway, back in 2000, there were those that remained and as people say today, ‘embraced the suck’. And by July, Symantec, owners/makers of Norton at the time, and a $1B revenue company came calling with an offer. It was a $1B offer for AXENT or 10X revenue. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2000/07/28/symantec-to-acquire-rockville-based-axent/5a4a05f1-1552-4138-8acb-6ee9c8c07e8e/

Many remained with Symantec and did very well in their careers, and financially. And beyond, using the acquisition event, along with their work with a major premiere software vendor, they established themselves, and their career success. Many moved into higher-paying roles and promotions. Some even became set for life, and to a degree for their careers. That’s not to say that those that had left did poorly. Many of them did also very well in their careers too.

Regardless, of the resignations, and the turbulence it caused, it wasn't the end of the world. Dramatic times for sure, but it all worked out well.?I stayed for the transition at Symantec and then shortly after I went on to be the Chief Operating Officer of TruSecure (now Verizon) and then CEO of LogicLibrary (now RogueWave). And since then I have worked with so many former AXENT folks, even ones that left before the Symantec acquisition. It’s a small world and life is short, and we all have goals where we could help each other, regardless of the decisions we made.?

The commitment to stay at AXENT when others were leaving paid off for me, both in my career and financially. For some others quitting was as good. But the lesson for me throughout my career was to stick it out. I learned that lesson early in my career, missing out on a huge opportunity by leaving early at a company I help build. But since then, every company I have been associated with ---outside of my short stint in academia---?has resulted in a successful sale and transition, and improved situation for those I worked alongside.

What's important for all of us to remember is that ‘we’ have been here before. This is not new territory. It's cyclical. The great resignation happened last over 22 years ago from 1997 to early 2001. And it will happen again in the future. The cause(s) for this is ‘quit’ may be different but how we move forward in our careers and in our life really isn’t that different. The Great Resignation did not appear out of nowhere, according to the Harvard Business Review; no, it was spurred on by the pandemic and was a natural consequence of the five factors: retirement, relocation, reconsideration, reshuffling, and reluctance. And while the causes differ from the dot com era ‘quit’, our response to it, and how we manage it, are the same.?

At AXENT, as an organization, we stayed the course. We focused on the business. We replaced those that left with equally high-quality individuals. We continued to improve our products and attract new customers and grow the business. And at the same time, we responded to companies that wanted to acquire us. In short, we focused on the basics and executed. We didn’t lament the losses but stayed true to what the company needed and the strategy we committed. And it all worked out. And it will again.?

Finally remember: the great resignation works both ways. The people that leave your company may be a top grade to the organization they join. And the people that join your company will improve your organization in ways you can't imagine.

#staythecourse #topgrade